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Sharing Sound

These days, it’s typical to edit audio and send finished show reels digitally to colleagues a half dozen time zones away. Capturing field recordings at 192 kilohertz is routine. It’s common to source fresh sound effects from talented recordists living on the other side of the globe.

This digital revolution has evolved sound effects libraries over the past fifty years from vinly records to bursting online archives of hundreds of thousands of clips.

And now? Focused libraries known as sound effects bundles are shared on a growing number of independent websites. They are crafted by the masters of sound design and field recording that surround us. We hear their work in films, television, and games. We work with them. We share ideas with them online. Most importantly, the greatest impact of the sound bundle format is that this collection of people also includes you.

Do you want to list your field recordings or sound design clips online? Are you eager to share your ideas through audio with other pros? Want to learn how to build a collection of clips and sell them on the Web? Sound bundles make this possible. Today’s article explains.

This post describes what sound bundles are, and how they are different. It includes a step-by-step guide that teaches you how to build an exceptional sound bundle yourself.

But all of this talk about sharing sound online invites another question: if you’ve created a great preview that showcases your best work, doesn’t it put your library at risk?

It’s true. We all know that sample pirating exists. There are ways to rip audio from Flash players, and that includes SoundCloud. It’s easy to find the direct link to your preview and download it from your website. Once your library is digitized and online, there is a risk it may be stolen. It’s unfortunate, but it’s reality.

How can you offer your best work online, and protect it?

There are three ways to deal with sample theft. I’ll explain each in this article.

Much of the appeal of field recording comes from how the craft changes. One day you’ll be crawling under a car lashing microphones to its chassis. The next you may be wrangling puppies to record dog vocals. Perhaps today you’ve piled up a creative stack of plug-ins to create a shimmering, unearthly drone.

You’ve captured, mastered, and organized impressive sound effects. Now you’re excited to share them. How can you do this?

I suggested some ideas in my book, Selling Creative Sound. That showed how to share your sound effects library on existing Web shops. What if you want to build your own store?

That’s trickier. It introduces a new challenge. The Web is vast. How do fans find your work?

Last week a new option emerged to help: A Sound Effect. It’s a website that catalogs independent sound libraries. It helps recordists list their work, and helps fans find them.

A Sound Effect was created by Asbjoern Andersen. I reached out to Andersen to ask him about the site. He kindly answered some questions about his background and his vision for the site. Today I’ll share our conversation, as well as my experiences test-driving the site, and its impact on the sound effects community.

That is fairly obvious since we’ve all been shopping online for years now. From a shop owner’s perspective, however, it isn’t as easy as it looks. Selling Creative Sound explains how to share sounds on a partner’s site. If you want to share sound from your own home on the Web, you’ll need to figure out how to jump through each of those hoops.

The most vital, yet difficult, roles are sending payment information in a secure manner and exchanging payment for permission to use a sound.

Are you thinking about starting a sound effects store? Have one already? In today’s post I’ll explain what happens behind the scenes. I’ll also explore two options for getting this done: PayPal, and Stripe.

You’d think that sharing sound libraries would be simple. I once thought so. After all, I thought, how hard is it to send an MP3 to a fan?

That was in 2000. Since then, I’ve peeled back layers of library ingestion, SSL, licensing, and other arcane Web shop terms. There’s no manual for sharing sound. It was exciting exploring this world and discovering how it worked. But good information remained clouded. One reason I started this blog was to part these clouds. Why would I do this?

Well, one benefit to creating this site is that I’ve had the privilege of hearing cool tracks from people who visit. Others need to hear these recordings. They will love them. It still amazes me that we can hear recordings from thousands of kilometres away seconds after they happen. It’s easier than ever to trap and ship audio anywhere.

But this has introduced a problem. While transferring sound is simple, sharing it well is not. Why?

The transmission of a creative idea is never easy. It can be misunderstood, or corrupted midway. Crafting an irresistible collection is trickier. Serving it to others is harder still. Web shop ingestion is a maze of confusing requirements littered with land mines of bugs. And every shop is different. You’re busy recording cool tracks. Who has the 13 years I did to learn the ropes?

This is why I wrote my upcoming book, Selling Creative Sound. I’ve read email from many people who want to know how to share sound smartly, and support themselves from their work. The book is designed to help send your audio to fans quickly, wisely, and support you while you do it.

So, today I’ll share how to prepare a sound library for Web shops. It’s an abridged checklist taken from the book. It’s meant to prepare a bulletproof package that will be prized in Web shops, and, later, perhaps a site of your own.

They float around on networks and hard drives for other people to experience, and interpret.

I enjoy working as a sound librarian. I think about sound effects names, searches, and accuracy deeply. It is an important part of field recordings: it is the method by which our creations are accessed, and shared.

Because you’ll develop your own style for naming, today I’ll share 15 tips I keep in mind when creating names and assigning metadata. They’re tips I’ve picked up over the years I’ve spent optimizing collections for Web shops. You can use them as guidelines for your own methods. They’re general enough that they’ll strengthen your names and improve the chances that your sound will be found, and used.

Since these posts are taken from my upcoming book, Selling Creative Sound, you’ll see there’s a slant on selling sound. You can also apply the ideas to sharing sound at work, or on your own.

Its childhood begins with scouting. Its teen-aged years are when it is recorded. The college years are when its direction is shaped with mastering. The longest part of its life, its adulthood, is when it is shared.

In my book Field Recording: From Research to Wrap, I said that sharing sound is inherent to field recording. We capture sound so it can be released elsewhere: in the projects we work on, or for the fans who are listening.

Sharing sound clips happens in two ways. The first is by transmission: you can share audio by playing it (alone or within projects), sending it to someone, or so on. Another part of sharing a sound is being able to access it. Or, in other words, being able to find it. After all, we all have thousands of sound files in our libraries. We need to locate them to use them.

I’d like to write about just one part of how a sound effect can be found: by its name.

Today we’ll take a deep look at the ideas behind naming sound. I’ll explain five reasons why a name is a vital part of a sound effect. It’s about the philosophy behind naming a sound. I’ve written it to get us thinking.

A sound’s name can be created quickly. It takes only seconds of tapping a keyboard to compose a name. This is usually done during mastering. However, a name has such a large impact on sharing your sound library that I’ve dedicated an entire chapter to the idea in my upcoming book, Selling Creative Sound. My hope is that the ideas will help you share your creations more successfully.

Many shops sharing sound effects today will soon be extinct. They just don’t know it yet.

Last week I explained which shops will diminish and fade. Why will this happen? It’s because they’ve lost touch with technology, and the people that use sound effects.

You’re probably familiar with the idea. The same process has been happening to the music and movie industries. Traditional distribution is scrambling to adapt to the digital age.

Fans want easy access to movies and music. Shops struggle fitfully to protect their creative work, and earn a fair amount for sharing it. The result?

Movies and music become bookended with lecturing Interpol warnings, copy-protection schemes, delayed releases, and distribution staggered across dozens of territories.

It sounds complicated, doesn’t it? It is. Is there any point to sharing sound, then?

Of course! People yearn for good sound. Often they crave it more strongly than music and movie fans because the benefit is more direct. Sound effects are tools they need to assist projects they craft every day.

So, if the old ways of sharing sound are dying, what can we expect from the future?

Today’s post will describe the future of sharing sound, and how your sound effects library will join it.